


Scenes from a #Roadtrip

by Themistoklis



Category: Fake News RPF, Pundit RPF, Pundit RPF (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-09
Updated: 2010-05-09
Packaged: 2017-10-09 09:31:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/85736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Themistoklis/pseuds/Themistoklis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jon and Stephen are returning from a conference in L.A. when bad weather cancels their flight. The end up driving from Des Moines to New York.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scenes from a #Roadtrip

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bessemerprocess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bessemerprocess/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Scenes From A Roadtrip](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10414) by [bessemerprocess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bessemerprocess/pseuds/bessemerprocess). 



> Thanks to politicette for beta reading and pushing me to go in the direction I wanted to go with this. Some lines of dialogue (the ones you will probably like best) are directly from bessemerprocess's story.

Stephen is secretly enjoying the fuck-up their trip has become.

Though it's a secret to him, at least at first.

First is the mindless panic when he looks down between his feet only to see absolutely nothing but dusty floor. And that one of his shoes is untied. But there is a definite lack of robot hovering at his heels, and he has absolutely no idea how Andydroid managed to get away without him noticing.

He manages to swallow and braces himself on the table behind him, gripping the edge while he looks out over the mess of convention tables and booths and the crowd, thin where it's boring and glutting the walkways where new reveals are underway. In twenty minutes, the Los Angeles Robotics Conference is going to take in entries for the various 2010 model contests. After eighteen months and missing last year's conference entirely, Stephen has finally put together a bot he can actually present to people.

And he went and ran off.

Jon is going to fucking kill him.

\---

All he needs is a reaction, any reaction from Jon. A frown, a slap upside the head. But Jon is just staring at him over the rim of a coffee cup.

"I'm really sorry I lost him," he blurts again. His hands are shaking. "He has to be around here somewhere."

Andy is tiny, about as big as a dinner plate, and he's zipping around the convention hall with more than a thousand pairs of feet crushing down without thought.

The current chassis ended up being deemed the not-Roomba, by grace of the shallow, clear, hard dome protecting the instrument panels and lights. It has eight wheels along its circumference, better to allow for mobility and controlled turns. Eventually Andy will have a body that lets him crawl and climb, but Stephen thinks the not-Roomba is a huge step up from Andy's last body. He'd been a box on treads, not even as cool-looking as a tank.

Jon reaches up and Stephen flinches, sure the hand gliding towards his face is going to curl into a fist, sure knuckles are going to collide with his bad ear at any second. He would want to hit him, too, losing an AI that's already cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in research and development.

The fingertips ruffling his hair really knock him off balance.

He cracks one eye open and Jon smirks at him, sipping his coffee. "Look down."

Stephen looks down.

The blue lights on Andy's back flare at him, and he thinks he hears chirping past the hammering in his ears. The not-Roomba eases forward and bumps off his shoes before spinning and darting back around to hide behind Jon's feet, underneath the Leibowitz Labs booth Jon is leaning against.

"He found me five minutes ago," Jon says. "I think the crowd was starting to overload him."

"Oh," Stephen breathes, and it's like all his bones are gone.

Jon shakes his cup. "Coffee?"

He breathes in and out, in and out, then looks up and cups his hands to either side of Jon's face. Blue eyes blink at him, flicker and shudder. "Andy _came home_."

The corner of Jon's mouth twitches. Stephen presses his thumbs into Jon's face and draws arcs across his skin. "Uh-huh."

Stephen makes a strangled sound and gathers Andy up, jogging off to the contest area while Andy whirs his wheels against Stephen's chest, a protest at not being allowed to walk.

\---

Hooked up to a laptop for interfacing and an extension cord to charge, Andy is content to sit at the Leibowitz Labs booth and let people come by and stare at him. Every once in a while Stephen stops chewing on the pen he's pretty sure doesn't have any more ink in it to look up and answer some questions.

Usually after Jon whacks the back of his head with a rolled-up flyer.

Fingertips tug at his earlobe and he reaches up to bat them away, his hand connecting clumsily with his boss's. He only looks up when Jon links their fingers together and tugs at Stephen's knuckles.

"Stephen," Jon says, for probably the third time. Stephen can tell from the way his eyes have settled. "This is Anderson Cooper. He says hi."

Stephen blinks and looks up at the person standing in front of the booth (although radiant energy being might be more appropriate, flourescent lighting making white hair glow and eyes bluer than Jon's sparkling at him over the rim of some reading glasses). He's got his hands stuck into pockets of designer jeans and the corner of his mouth is turned up like he's trying not to laugh.

"Hi. I'm Anderson Cooper," Anderson Cooper says.

"Um."

"He wants to ask Andy a question," Jon says.

Stephen notices he's holding one of their business cards, the tiny white squares embossed with the company name and Jon's contact info on the front. Jon's scribbled a more personal e-mail address on the back, and Stephen's contact info underneath it. Stephen looks at the way Anderson is looking at Jon and his fingers twitch over his keyboard.

Shifting his weight, Anderson leans forward and leans over Andy a little. "So, uh. Are you enjoying the conference?" he asks.

_[[[…]]]_

"It takes a minute," Stephen says. "We just installed a couple of new programs and he's still trying to sort everything out."

_[[[…]]]_

"I was just telling Jon, you two should bring him out in a few months for the AI Play Date conference."

Stephen shrugs with one shoulder. The screen lights up as the computer recreates the letters streaming across Andy's digital screen, only in much bigger type.

_[[[@NICEPERSON gave @ANDYDROID a blue ribbon for being Best Debut. This is acceptable.]]]_

Anderson giggles, and his laugh may be more embarrassing than Jon's. "Niceperson?"

"It's the default name he uses to refer to people he doesn't know."

"Where's your ribbon?" Anderson asks.

_[[[…_

…

@ANDYDROID believes that @STEPHENCOLBERT has the blue ribbon.

…

…

This is not acceptable.]]]

Stephen puts his head down on his laptop and doesn't lift it again, not even when Jon tugs at his ear. He can't decide if he's holding back tears or laughter.

\---

Packing up the Leibowitz Labs booth requires both of them, plus the two people from the West Coast branch Jon had hired to help them man it during the conference. Stephen hovers over all of their luggage, triple-checking the zippers and ties, patting Andy when he chirps from inside the backpack set on top of the pile.

Jon comes up and claps his hand over Stephen's shoulder. "We ready?"

"I think so," Stephen says. He counts the bags one last time. "We didn't leave anything at the hotel, right?"

"We called to have them check, Stephen."

"Right, right." He inhales. "Then we're ready."

Jon tilts his head to one side and looks at him carefully. He doesn't have his glasses on. Stephen hopes he didn't forget them somewhere. "You want to stop to get something to eat before we get on the plane?"

Inside the bag, Andy chirps again, loud enough this time that Stephen winces. He scuttles over and tugs him out, looking him over before deciding he was just annoyed at being in the bag in the first place. "Shush, shush," he says, stowing him back in. He can come out to play later.

"Stephen?"

"I'll be fine. They'll give us something on the plane."

\---

The airport is always a trial in patience for Stephen.

And that's only for his usual travels, business presentations for Leibowitz Labs: bags of clothes and suspicious shampoos, three laptops, at least one external hard drive, a wireless mouse, one or more bags of swag emblazoned with the Leibowitz logo for whoever he needed to cozy up to on that trip, and a roll of blueprints he carries closer to his chest than his wallet, because they'd be fucked six ways to Sunday if someone else got their hands on them. It takes long enough to convince security he is not in fact a disaffected United States citizen attempting to overthrow the government with new high-tech tomfoolery. By the time he's through, normally, he's running to the gate.

Add in an advanced AI who doesn't like to go through scanning equipment, and he might as well bring a folding chair with him to the security line.

"Sir, please control your robot," and he has to hand it to the TSA agent with the smart red hair for keeping her face absolutely straight. "We have to ascertain that it is not a bomb before we can allow you to transport it on the airplane."

Stephen's palms are sweating so bad he thinks he might drop Andy. "No, I know, it's just, he really hates it, and if there was just some way I could walk through _with_ him it would be--"

"Perhaps you should ship the robot separately, sir," the TSA agent suggests. "There is a UPS store very close to here."

She looks like she's eyeing the clock and is due at any moment to check out of the airport for the day or perhaps the rest of her life. Stephen's mouth is dry, and his tongue is gumming up his mouth. In his fingers, Andy is idly spinning his wheels even though he has to know it's not going to get him anywhere.

Jon's hand is suddenly pressing into the gap between his shoulder blades, and Stephen very nearly does drop Andy. "Turn him off, Stephen," he murmurs. "It'll just be ten minutes, and it'll be easier on everyone."

"Right, right." But he can't get the dome to pop off and Jon has to gently pry the not-Roomba body from his hands, go through the motions for him.

The process isn't elevated to fuck-up level until Stephen's about to fall over while he tries to put his shoes back on, though. Most of their luggage is piled at his feet and he's busy making sure a ninja isn't going to dart by and make off into the shadows with their laptops when he realizes that the _chirp chirp chirp_ that signals Andy being fully online is too soft to be coming from his feet.

That's because it's coming from an increasingly widening distance, which is most assuredly not around Stephen's feet, and oh, God, Jon is seriously going to fucking kill him this time. There's no 'home' in the L.A. airport for Andy to go to.

It's at the fuck-up level when Andy disappears into the crowd and Stephen hears a woman scream because a not-Roomba is twinkling blue lights at her toddler, although in Stephen's defense the kid was totally eating it up, and Andy was only blinking them in time with the _Mary Had a Little Lamb_ recording piping out of his speakers anyway.

"He's bored," Stephen stammers, leaving his shoes with security to scamper over to the woman. She puts her hands on her hips and glares at him, her baby cooing and grasping at the air when Stephen scoops Andy up in his arms. "He was just looking for another kid to play with."

The woman stares at him and Stephen walks backwards until he bumps into his luggage again.

"If you don't stop it I'm going to have to zip you up," he hisses.

Andy just flashes at him, so he shakes his half-empty backpack for good measure. If he's enjoying the mess, it's a secret to him.

It's definitely a secret to Jon, from the way he acts when they're told the flight won't be leaving for a few hours because of some clouds. That those clouds are literally hovering a few inches above the tarmac and making it hard for taller people to see the ends of their fingers when they stretch their arms out doesn't make either of them feel better. It stays a secret every time they check at the counter and someone extends the delay time.

To top it all off, half of LARC is flying out at apparently the exact same time, and they're getting recognized left and right. Stephen's chest aches. Always having to be _on_, smiling and covering up for how Jon's edges are fraying quicker and quicker the deeper they wade into what turns out to be the six-hour delay.

Stephen stops everyone who doesn't have gloves on and torch burns on their fingertips and robots humming contentedly between their feet to ask where they can maybe get a moment of privacy. Some place to cool their heads.

And maybe he's kind of almost secretly enjoying the extra delay hours when one of the airport workers turns out to really, really, really like their work. He lets them into a lounge they have no business being in, with couches so nice Stephen wonders if some Congressmen are about to walk in on them.

"I loved your show when I was a kid," the guy gushes, and Stephen feels all of ten thousand and one. "The Colbert Science Affair. We used to watch it in class, too, and everybody would sing along, even in high school. I had my first gay crush on Paul Dinello."

That launches Jon into a fit of laughter he tries to hide as an asthma attack, and in his arms Andy whirs, distressed at the sudden violent movement. Stephen pulls out one of his biggest smiles and sticks his tongue out at his boss.

"I could give you his number," he says, and Jon wheezes so badly Andy drops onto a chair. The airplane attendant stammers and turns beet red before scampering back off to his desk.

Jon sets Andy on the floor and Stephen watches him zip between all of the legs of furniture, bumping into one chair three times before turning around in disgust when even the shallow height of his dome doesn't let him under. He hopes the robot isn't going to resent him for turning him off earlier.

Alone and without an audience, Jon lies down on a couch and throws his arm across his eyes, and Stephen settles down on the floor.

He tests the new seeking program they'd just written over the course of the conference with a bouncy ball he'd gotten for fifty cents in a gumball machine. Andy picks it up with a pincer he can extend from one side and poke things with, and which Stephen refuses to call a hand because he has four of them.

Jon teases him for playing fetch with the robot.

On the airplane, any enjoyment couldn't be more of a secret than when Andy wriggles out of the backpack Stephen had stowed under his seat and shoots off down the aisle of the airplane, which makes several people scream and ends with a very involved conversation with a U.S. Air Marshal.

Drained, Jon dozes off and Stephen watches him sleep before he tucks himself into a curl and rides the last ten minutes of the flight with his eyes shut, too.

He's pretty surprised to open them in Des Moines and not New York.

It's not even in the same damn time zone.

\---

Andy's battery is lagging at quarter-full, which isn't all that bad, really, but means he's reserved, quiet. He's stopped chirping and all but one of his lights are off, and he doesn't whir his wheels uselessly when they pick him up. His speakers are relentlessly quiet, yelps and protests not worth the expenditure of energy.

For a tired kid, he's pretty well behaved.

In any estimation, including his own, Stephen isn't.

Skipping a meal before going to the airport had been an unwise decision, a fact borne out when Stephen nearly dissolves into tears in front of the first locked vending machine. Even clutching Andy close to his chest doesn't make him feel any better -- the robot is too tired to put out the smallest burst of light or comfortingly roll his wheels over Stephen's shirt. He turns to Jon for a measure of comfort and finds an empty space, half their luggage gone.

A brief blazing moment of panic has Stephen absolutely convinced Jon has up and left him. It only starts to fade when he realizes he does still have Andy, and no matter what he'd just spent fifteen minutes muttering under his breath (why the fuck had they diverted the plane in Iowa of all places) Jon wouldn't leave Andy behind.

The not-Roomba becomes a kind of hostage ensuring Stephen's continued safety. He shuffles around until he finds Jon talking to someone at a desk and rubbing his hands into his eyes.

"Jon?"

"No more flights out tonight," Jon says, tersely.

He turns around and walks away from the desk with all of his luggage hanging off him. Stephen squeezes Andy and follows in his wake, sure that if there was anyone in the building with them the crowd would part at Jon's dark look.

The first place they come to that rents cars gets their business. Jon pulls out a company credit card but all it gets them is the last one that's still in residence at that time of night. Stephen doesn't have enough energy to actually vocalize 'punch buggy no punch back' when a yellow VW bug clicks up in front of them, rental keys swinging from the ignition, so Jon gives him a pretty weird look when he punches him in the shoulder.

Jon and the worker are shoving their stuff into the trunk while Stephen tries to coax Andy all the way into sleep mode. It's going to be too long a drive (they can't guarantee the first hotel they come to will have open rooms) for him to stay completely on, even at his lowest level of power usage.

"C'mon," Stephen murmurs, sitting sideways on the backseat with his legs hanging over the doorframe. He bends his head low over Andy's vocal processor -- the dome is sitting on a laptop case already stowed on the floor of the backseat -- and whispers. "Please go into sleep mode. Please."

Something besides the stream of _[[[…]]]_ finally appears on the digital screen. In the light from inside the rental agency Stephen doesn't have too much trouble reading it.

_[[[@ANDYDROID requests the return of his blue ribbon from @STEPHENCOLBERT before entry into sleep mode.]]]_

Jon runs his fingertips through Stephen's hair and rubs his thumb into the base of his neck while Stephen whimpers, doubled-over. It takes a couple of extra minutes to find the damned ribbon, but as soon as they attach it to the dome and screw the dome back onto Andy's back, the familiar __zzZZZzzZzzZZzZ__ appears on the digital screen.

"We've got to get something in you," Jon says. "You're seriously falling apart."

Stephen pulls one foot up on his seat and rides all the way to the restaurant with his chin on his knee, his eyes screwed shut against oncoming headlights. The car is cramped enough that his thigh touches Jon's for the whole trip.

Edges come back to things when the chicken nuggets carton is empty and he's halfway through his soda. Jon still looks bleary-eyed, even though he gets two cups of dollar coffee from the counter. On the bench next to him, Andy is purring, plugged into an outlet meant for laptops (they do have a laptop plugged in, but it's on the other bench, next to Stephen). The lights on his back are spinning a point of blue in a slow circle around his circumference.

"You're not going to be able to sleep," Stephen says, swiping a fry off Jon's tray. He smears it through Jon's ketchup and pops it in his mouth while Jon stirs his coffee, the straw _plinking_ against the edges of the cup. "I can drive. You should get water."

"Chicken," Jon says into his coffee, "makes you sleepy. And you just stuffed your face with it."

"That's turkey," Stephen says.

But it's late, and his watch is wrong, and he's very, very full, and he isn't entirely sure. Maybe it is chicken. He leans back in the booth and blinks, finally deciding that he's going to get the equivalent of ice cream before they leave. He scoops up another few of Jon's fries, more of Jon's ketchup. At this rate he's going to eat more of Jon's food than Jon is.

"The conference was a success, anyway."

"Mmm." Jon takes twice as long to chew his food as anyone else would. "We got a lot of interest in Andy." He stops to eat another fry and tilts his head to one side. "And you."

"Clearly I need my own business cards."

Jon leisurely inhales some of his coffee and curls both his hands around the cup. "I got a couple of headhunters talking to me about employee benefits, trying to figure out what to offer you to get you to bring Andy somewhere else."

Stephen feels something inside him flutter. He puts it down to consuming more chicken nuggets than he bothered to count and one and a half cartons of fries within a thirty-minute period.

The inside of his throat is sticky with soda, so it takes a couple of tries to get out, "I wouldn't."

Jon raises an eyebrow at him. "Who else would treat you to such lavish dinners?" he asks, finally taking a bite of his hamburger.

"Besides," Stephen says, making a face at him and poking at Andy's back, "he's too attached to you."

"You really shouldn't keep a marriage together for the kids, Colbert," Jon drawls.

"Well, even if you are a loveless husk of a human being, I'm still head over heels for Leibowitz Labs."

"Good to know."

"So, in other LARC observations, Anderson Cooper totally wanted to jump your bones."

Jon nearly chokes on his drink and Stephen swipes a few more of his fries.

They both get ice cream on the way out, and the girl at the counter says Andy is cute. She pats his dome and he flashes his lights a little. They roll their eyes -- their robot is a flirt. Stephen is definitely enjoying the fuck-up. Just a little.

His ice cream has M&amp;Ms.

\---

The clerk in the lobby looks up from her magazine and her eyes go wide with what Stephen has come to recognize as recognition. He sticks his spoon in his mouth, slurping down M&amp;Ms, and hunches his shoulders a little. From the corner of his eye he can see Jon seeing him, and his boss eases in front of him, walking a step faster to get to the counter first. Stephen stands behind him and keeps his lips pressed close around his spoon.

"Hi," Jon says. He gives her a little wave, for good measure.

The clerk looks him up and down and grins, setting both her elbows on the desk. "Are you Jon Leibowitz? I read about you at Groovy Gadgets."

Jon glances back at him, and Stephen's toes curl inside his shoes. Amy's tech blog had profiles for both of them (several for Stephen, over the course of his career, he was starting to get disturbed at the new questions Amy was coming up with). He was still paying for convincing Jon to do the piece in the first place. Amy must've known she wasn't going to get many chances to ask him questions on the record.

"What're you doing in Des Moines?"

"Trouble at the airport."

The clerk wrinkles her nose. "I knew it couldn't be anything interesting. We need to get some investment out here." She taps a pin on her collar that Stephen recognizes as an Amateur Robotics Association sigil.

Jon nods, ever concerned with the plight of Midwestern young adults. "Do you have two rooms available?"

"Oh!" She spins to the computer and taps at the keyboard. "Yes sir we do, two nonsmoking, fourth floor. Adjoining?"

"That's fine," Jon says, without turning around to check with him.

Stephen wriggles his spoon out of his mouth and clears his throat. "Is there WiFi?"

"Free."

"What's your policy on robots?"

The clerk fairly lights up. "You brought one with you?"

Andy's never been let loose in a hotel lobby before. The clerk calls someone to bring all their stuff to their rooms, and coos over how much Andy loves his ribbon.

\---

Stephen doesn't sleep for very long, which he blames on Jon's coffee fumes.

He rolls out of bed at what appears to be five a.m. in whatever the hell time zone they're in, and turns on Andy while he drops his clothes on the bed and clambers into the tub for an actual bath. At one point he hears a gentle _chug-chug-chug_ and opens one eye to see Andy roll into the bathroom. He checks out the area under the sink and bumps against the tub a couple of times before leaving again.

It's not until the water's cool going on cold that Stephen finally wrests himself from the bubbly embrace of the tub.

The sound of sloshing water draws Andy back to the bathroom, and Stephen hits the door shut with his hip, knocking the robot back in the process. He ignores the affronted chirps in favor of toweling off and warming his legs up with the hairdryer connected to the wall.

Andy is sulking by the air conditioner when he finally comes out. "Sorry, buddy," he murmurs.

He's just pulling on his pants from the day before (he doesn't have any clean pairs left, because they were supposed to be _home_) when the connecting door to the next room swings open. He absolutely does not yell or spin around or get tangled up in the pants legs, and he absolutely does not fall over a chair, and he absolutely does not land at Jon's feet with his pants wrapped around his ankles.

He does lace his fingers together across his stomach and beam up at Jon, breathing hard and utterly failing to casually cross his legs.

"Hello."

Jon gestures with a ceramic white coffee cup, the hotel's paper coaster stuck to the bottom. "Coffee?"

"Nah."

Nudging at Stephen's feet, Andy moves around him to roll into Jon's room. Stephen flops over on his side to let him pass, and watches him putter around exploring the layout for a minute until Jon interrupts his thoughts.

"There aren't any flights out today."

"Aw, fuck."

Jon sips his coffee, winces at the heat, and shuffles backwards a little. He raises an eyebrow and then rolls his eyes when Stephen reaches up with both hands, flexing his fingers in the air in a _gimme gimme_ gesture. When Jon holds out one finger and disappears back into his room, Stephen lets his knees flop sideways onto the floor.

"What is Andy doing?"

"Trying to mate with the air conditioner."

He's pretty sure he could go back to sleep on the carpet. It's been a long few days, a lot of traveling, a lot of smiling, and the continental breakfast isn't even open yet. Getting off the floor doesn't seem particularly worth it.

When Jon comes back to the doorway, hands thrust out for Stephen's, he's taken off the shirt he was sleeping in (the same shirt he'd been wearing on the plane the day before) and hasn't bothered to put another one on yet.

Stephen lifts out his hands again and curls his fingers around Jon's wrists. He shoves himself up with his knees and his stomach bumps into Jon's. Around his ankles, his pants keep him from backing up.

"Let's drive home," Stephen says. "We're halfway there already."

Blinking, Jon asks, "In a yellow Bug?"

"Why not? What's wrong with the humble yellow Bug? Does it not have wheels? Does it not go forward?" Stephen says, gesturing emphatically. He doesn't think his current pantsless state affects the force of his argument.

Jon lets out a sigh that takes all the tension in his shoulders with it, he slumps against the doorframe and plucks at the drawstrings on his pajama pants. He mumbles something about taking the instant coffee from Stephen's bathroom and turns around to shuffle back into his bedroom.

"What about Andy?" he calls.

"Eh." Stephen flaps his hands and yanks his pants up, messes with the belt. "We'll stop to eat and he'll be able to charge. And if he can't we'll just put him in hibernation."

"Sure. Then he'll be mad at the time gap in his memory and make us write reports to fill it in before he'll do anything again."

"That only happened once!"

The phone clicks and there's a buzz as Jon calls up the rental company to let them know they're about to put an extra thousand miles on the Bug. Stephen grumbles and finds a shirt to pull on that's moderately clean, scoops Andy up and plugs him in for a last burst of charging.

"We're gonna take a road trip," he tells him, fiddling with the power cord. "Drive back to New York."

_[[[This is inefficient.]]]_

"Wildly," Jon calls. Stephen jumps -- he didn't realize the connecting door was still open. He keeps his back to it while he listens to fabric rustle and zippers zip.

"There's no planes running today. It'll be faster to drive."

_[[[@ANDYDROID does not enjoy being in the car.]]]_

"I know, buddy."

_[[[In the car @ANDYDROID has no new input to process.]]]_

"Jon and I will keep you entertained, okay?"

_[[[… … This is acceptable.]]]_

It takes less than five minutes for Stephen to repack his bags.

\---

The best part about road trips is stopping at the gas station before you reach the highway.

Jon keeps Andy in his backpack when they go in, because it's best not to advertise you're carrying expensive robotic equipment at a gas station. Not that Andy doesn't completely blow that plan out of the water when he chirps shrilly as Jon stares at the various salty snacks the QT is offering.

"It's not a bomb," he says, and the clerk does maybe her first and last bag check ever.

Andy doesn't appreciate getting handled like that, and they buy some wet wipes to clean off his dome with once they get back to the car.

Stephen dumps his take out on his lap, ignoring it when Jon looks over and whistles at all of what he bought. Twizzlers, because if there's one thing he likes to do it's Twizzle. Starburst, because he's not a fucking fascist, and he likes unwrapping the tiny packages. Snowcaps, for when he plugs in his iPod and ignores Jon in favor of Iron Man.

"If you go into a sugar coma," Jon says, scowling, "I'm not stopping to take you into the hospital."

"You have to be properly prepared, Jon."

"When you can use Twizzlers to buy us gas when we need to refill, I'll consider that properly prepared."

"Just you watch."

Jon snorts.

"My wireless card is getting a signal out here," Stephen says a few minutes later, when they're on the road and he's got his laptop open at his feet. "So if you want to switch driving soon and start going through your e-mail from the conference, you can."

"We pay people to go through our e-mail so I don't have to do that in the car."

"Well. You gave Anderson a different address."

He bites down on a Twizzler and finds it's an effective way to keep his mouth occupied while Jon looks at him sideways. When he's finally done, Jon starts to say something, but Stephen turns up the radio before anything can come out.

Andy chirps his protest at the station Stephen picks.

\---

Traveling with Jon, alone, isn't something Stephen's ever done. He's been with Leibowitz Labs for six years now, and he's never traveled alone with Jon -- and not in such a cramped space as a VW Bug.

On planes, they were surrounded by people. And planes were the things they took most often. Cars that they rented or got driven around in while they were on business trips had other people in them. Even while walking down the street from the labs to get lunch, Jon's hand brushing against his back at crosswalks, they were surrounded by other people.

A car with the two of them and an AI wasn't nearly as personable as Stephen would have guessed.

Whenever he ignores Andy for too long, they get chirped at. And at one point in the evening he's blaring requests for @JONLEIBOWITZ across his screen, apparently dissatisfied with Stephen's care. He finally gives up, puts Andy on the floor at his feet, and hooks him into a laptop. Running the cataloguing program will keep Andy occupied for a good long while, classifying all the input he'd gathered at the conference.

To amuse himself, he changes @JONLEIBOWITZ to @JONSOLO. Andy doesn't seem to have a hard time adjusting.

Playing 'find Sherlock Holmes' on Wikipedia lands him on a page of U.S. Presidents, and at least that gives them a topic of conversation. "What do people remember Eisenhower for?"

"Ushering in the modern era of campaign advertising?"

"What?"

"'I like Ike.' Adlai Stevenson refused to advertise his campaign. He thought it was demeaning to the process or something, and lost--"

"Jon, stop. Just stop."

"What?"

"You're making me sad."

"Fuck you."

Andy bumps against Stephen's toes and he's careful not to lift his feet. The last time he did that, he ended up bringing his shoes down on top of the console (they had a totally different story for why they added the dome to the not-Roomba design, of course).

"He doesn't like it when you curse," he sniffs. Jon glares at him and he clears his throat. "No no, people remember Eisenhower for the world-changing system you see before us. They were meant to save us in case of the apocalypse. To clear the way for the military to sweep in after us and save us from the Red Menace."

Jon flicks his eyes up to the rearview mirror and _mmm_s under his breath.

\---

Jon can't hum a tune for the life of him, but his voice is big when he lets it be, and Stephen sits back while it washes over the car. He rides along in it, gripping the wheel extra tight for support, his eyes fluttering around so they don't land on Jon's when Jon is looking over at him.

Andy's in control of iTunes, his selection program analyzing the number of plays and star rating Stephen's given each song to come out with a pick. Mostly, he picks the same song over and over again, once he manages to locate it. Stephen doesn't let himself get embarrassed about anything that comes up on the play list, even when the Spices' "Wannabe" blasts on over the speakers so loudly they both yelp.

"Why the fuck--" Jon starts, jostling the laptop.

"IF YOU WANNABE MY LOVER, YOU'VE GOTTA GET WITH MY FRIENDS," Stephen belts.

Jon laughs through the whole replay, the first time. Like he's enjoying the fuck-up the trip's become a little himself. That laughter fades the third, though, and he pulls up an interface window to try to influence the next song the first time the chorus rolls around. They try to coax Andy into picking things himself rather than interrupting his program by switching songs on their own whims.

_Click click click._ Jon pauses. Frowns. _Click click click click._

"Something wrong?" he asks, trying to keep the strain out of his voice. Did the Air Marshal shake Andy too hard when he picked him up on the plane? Did the new tracking program interfere with something else?

Jon wets his lips. "It's saying @JONLEIBOWITZ not recognized."

"Oh."

"I'm trying to get him to shift to shuffle."

Stephen swallows. "Just use my name."

_Click click … click click._

"Stephen?"

"Hmm?" He's rethinking whether to roll down the window. It might sweep away some of the steam pouring off his face.

"Andy says, 'hello @STEPHENCOLBERT. where is @JONSOLO?'"

"Um."

"I'd like to know that too."

Stephen rubs his hands along the steering wheel, strokes his thumbs over the logo in the middle. He wishes he wasn't driving. Of course, if he wasn't driving, Jon wouldn't know about the reprogramming yet.

He eases up on the gas, a little. "Are you mad?"

At Jon's feet Andy makes some sounds between songs, and since the next one that comes on is some instrumental piece Stephen figures that Jon got Andy to institute shuffle. Jon makes a guttural noise, rolling his shoulders and pushing back against his chair. He stretches his legs as much as he can, his knees crackling just a bit.

"No." He pauses. "Should I be?"

"No," Stephen says, and he is sure he is red from the neck up. Bright red. Glowing red. Bright, glowing, searing red. "I wasn't … I wasn't making fun of you."

Jon looks at him for a minute. He can feel him staring. But there are a few other people on the road, and this isn't really the time that he can glance away from the road, even to check to see the look in Jon's eyes. Then Jon wriggles in his seat, making a satisfied noise as he stretches as much as he can without unbuckling his seatbelt.

The music dies down, violins easing off and flutes fading. Andy makes a couple of beeps and "Wannabe" streams back on.

\---

A not-Roomba is particularly unhelpful, they discover, at changing tires.

They're in the middle of a chorus together, Andy's beeps just audible under the digital notes (he's making pretty good time), when the tire goes flat and they wobble to the side of the road just before the Ohio-Pennsylvania border.

Rain is starting to patter over the roof of the car and Stephen is frantically trying to find directions online for what they're about to do while Jon moves Andy to the backseat and shuffles luggage around to drag the spare tire out of the trunk. He tries to hit print a couple of times before he remembers where he is, and ends up chanting to the both of them twice over before clambering out of the car to join Jon -- who shoves a flashlight into his hand.

"If it wasn't raining we could bring Andy out here to help us see," Jon grunts, nodding at the blue interior of the backseat.

It's the last thing Stephen manages to hear from him over the rain. Jon ends up making hand signals to tell him what to do, and Stephen swallows rainwater while he struggles to comply. Somehow he gets the jack to ease the car up, far enough off the ground that Jon swaps the tire out. Stephen feels utterly useless standing at his shoulder.

The grass underneath their feet is running slick with mud. Parts of him he didn't know about are wet, and he's drinking in so much of the sky he's sure he's going to drown in the clouds.

The rain wets his khakis all the way up to the knees, the pale fabric stained as dark as the mud coating their shoes. Stephen slips on the incline, catching himself hard on his knees, and he's still wincing when Jon loops an arm around him. He picks Stephen up and says something -- something. Stephen blinks, the rain splattering right against his face (he has no idea what happened to his glasses, but he should have a spare somewhere) and shakes his head.

Jon places a hand to the side of Stephen's face and holds him still while eases onto his toes, puts his mouth next to Stephen's ear. Stephen can just hear him breathing over the storm.

"Are you okay?"

It's so much thunder, nearly lost in static jumping between the clouds above their heads. Jon's cool hand on his skin, his torch-burnt fingertips (he couldn't resist jumping into the fray at LARC, the ten-hour challenge to make a bot from a box of miscellaneous parts) pressing whorls and loops into Stephen's face.

"Wet," Stephen mumbles.

Jon flashes a grin at him and lets go, disappearing in the dark around the side of the car.

Andy's blue glow bumps over his figure and it takes a moment for Stephen to realize that Jon's claimed the driver's seat.

He grabs a dry towel from a suitcase in the back and hustles it to the passenger seat in relatively the same condition, tossing it on the floor to catch the mud from his shoes. A loud chirp sounds out from Andy when he slams the door shut behind him.

"You," he says, twisting around, "are dry. No complaining."

Andy goes dark for a moment and he's left in stuffy blindness, until a headlight comes by and cuts through the interior of the car. The other driver doesn't bother to turn his brights off, and before Andy comes back on and muddles the light Stephen can just see Jon in profile. Wet, Jon's shirt clings to the line of his shoulders. The headlights glare off the water clinging to his eyes, his mouth.

Stephen decides he's still enjoying this fuck-up of a trip.

\---

The first diner he sees has a picture of a giant pancake platter painted on the side of the building. Stephen considers it a sign and pulls into the parking lot. He runs his hand over Jon's arm, shoulder to wrist, pinches the webbing between his thumb and finger to wake him up. Jon stirs, arm rubbing against Stephen's. He blinks against the harsh lights and stares open-mouthed at the fried-egg eyes staring straight at them while Stephen opens his door.

"What the fuck?" he croaks, dryly.

"Not all of us can survive on the despair of others, Leibowitz," Stephen sniffs. He snaps open his seatbelt and swings sideways in his seat, planting his feet firmly on the pavement. "I want bacon. And maple syrup. Preferably not together."

"Coffee?" Jon mumbles, stretching without raising his arms.

It's weird to watch him, his body bucking slightly against the restraint of the seatbelt, his shoulders rolling backwards and his chin tilting up to expose his throat. All that time in the car has left his shirt riding up, his pants hanging low on his hips. At some point he'd lost his shoes and socks, and he wriggles his toes before slipping his feet back into the sneakers.

Stephen rolls his eyes. "Coffee."

While Jon extricates himself from the tangle of his seatbelt, Stephen reaches into the backseat and picks Andy up. The door had been open when Jon had transferred him from the floor to the back, and there's a spatter of water still clinging to the dome. Stephen starts to mop it up with his sleeve, which only smears more water against the plastic.

Jon's hand skates over his back and curls into his shirt, tugging at him. "C'mon. You didn't build him that delicate, and there'll be napkins inside."

"Yeah," Stephen says, but still tries to carry Andy inside without getting any more water on him. Jon takes in a laptop at his prodding. The waitress raises an eyebrow at them and points at an empty corner booth, the only one with an outlet. Jon shuffles in behind him and lays his head down on the table.

The coffee pot, at request, is left with them. Stephen eyes it sideways and wonders if he should go decaf with the reset of his soda refills, just to counter the second-hand caffeine he's inhaling. The two of them order big servings and split them, the hash browns alone enough to feed the entire band of senior techs at Leibowitz Labs. Stephen snags the ketchup out of Jon's hand and squirts it in a spiral over the heap of potatoes.

A table with just the two (three, if you count Andy, but he's asleep and not paying attention to them) of them seems ten times more expansive than the shared ones they'd had over the past few months. Accountants, lab techs, interns, visitors, collaborators, even one person crowds them both. But Stephen's having trouble with so much room to breathe.

He goes to get dry clothes to change into, pulling out a pile for Jon in the process. Scattered over the backseat are digital faces and cables, a prototype dark globe you can hold in your hand and get environmental readings with (Stephen suspects right now it'd tell him: dark, wet). They'd picked it up at a LARC booth.

By the time he comes back inside, Jon's getting a refill on his coffee pot, and Stephen makes a face at him when he drops his clothes off at the table.

"You're going to drive in your pajamas?" he sniffs over the rim of the cup.

"I want to be comfortable," Stephen says, tipping his chin up. He comes out of the bathroom a few minutes later in baggy pale blue cotton and sneakers.

Jon's got Andy plugged into a laptop, then, his fingers skating over the keyboard. Stephen pauses and decides to slide into the seat next to him, leaning over enough that he can read the laptop screen. The only reaction Jon has is to make a little extra room for him. Stephen shifts just enough that his knee is resting against Jon's leg.

[@JONSOLO: @ANDYDROID can you tell me all the @s you incorporated into your system at #LARC?]

_[[[At #LARC @ANDYDROID incorporated @ROBRIGGLE, @KALPENMODI, and @ANDERSONCOOPER.]]]_

"When did Rob come by?" Jon asks, frowning.

"While you were busy ignoring everybody in that ten-hour contest."

"I was not _ignoring_ everybody."

Stephen reaches over and pounds out: [@STEPHENCOLBERT: @ANDYDROID, what happened when @JONSOLO participated in #BuildABot?]

"Classy, Colbert."

_[[[@JONSOLO left @ANDYDROID alone at #LEIBOWITZLABS's booth. @NICEPERSON and @NICEPERSON at the booth did not know how to interface with @ANDYDROID. @ANDYDROID had no one with which to interface until @STEPHENCOLBERT returned 2.34 hours later.]]]_

"See? He was lonely."

"Why did it take over two hours for you to eat lunch?"

"Details, details." There booth had been towards the back, and there had been a lot of others to walk past on his way there.

"Well, we're not staying here for that long." Jon nudges him until he spills out of the booth and gathers up the clothes Stephen brought in from the car. "Pack up. I'm going to go change."

Stephen sighs and pats Andy's dome. "Time to go to sleep."

_[[[This is not preferred.]]]_

"Sorry. We have to go back to the car." He can feel the hair on the back of his neck pricking up as the waitress watches him talk to what she might think is a vacuum cleaner.

_[[[@ANDYDROID does not prefer being in the car. @JONSOLO and @STEPHENCOLBERT spend an excessive amount of time in the car.]]]_

"We'll be done soon," Stephen says. "Promise."

_[[[@ANDYDROID accepts @STEPHENCOLBERT's promise.]]]_

Jon emerges from the bathroom like a butterfly, his last pair of sweatpants and his last gray t-shirt sacrificed to the weather gods in favor of a brilliant blue t-shirt and a pair of cargo pants.

He yawns something that might be an attempt at language and stands next to the table to polish off the rest of his coffee mug. Stephen can see three restroom stops in the next two hours, and he sips at his caffeine-free Sprite without a word.

They leave a tip and Jon carries Andy out tucked under his arm.

Jon falls asleep the second his head hits the seat (he insists on sitting up front) and they don't stop again until midnight. Stephen pulls over at a rest stop that still has the lights on and stares at him until he wakes up on his own.

Stephen's out of the car before Jon can open his eyes.

The cold night air is bracing.

\---

Sometime ago they both turned off their flashlights.

Stephen isn't sure when it happened. He doesn't know if he did it first, or if he followed Jon. He doesn't remember his eyes adjusting to the dark. But they're not tripping over everything, either, although that's mostly due to Andy's steady, consistent glow.

He's rolling over the edge of the out-of-the-way paved road, branching off from the deserted rest stop. It's open on either side of the pavement, though, grass sprawling until flat land finds a hill and trees. Open all the way up above them, too.

Jon wanted to take a walk before getting back in the car.

From the way Jon's body leans, Stephen can tell he's looking all over the sky. While his chin is tilted up, Jon's lips are just slightly parted, and his fingers wiggle inside his pockets. Stephen just watches the same constellation. They're not strolling over enough ground to make it shift. He's seen stars before. Cold points of light in a cold sky, warm bursts sneaking through scattered clouds.

Stars are all old light with nothing chasing behind it, busted bulbs enough to make his chest ache. How can you fall in love with something when it might've died before your kind were a wrinkle on the planet's skin?

"You can see real constellations out here: Orion and Cassiopeia and the Pleiades," Jon is murmuring, susurrating in time with the wind. "The sky isn't flooded with light."

Andy whirls at the sound of his voice and makes a couple of excited loops around their ankles, forcing them to stop so they don't trip over him. Jon crouches down and murmurs something at him, rests his hand on the dome, and when he stands back up Andy continues on in front of them. He's moving slower now, forcing them to ease up their own pace.

The quiet sounds like Jon is waiting for him to say something.

"I didn't know you were an astronomy buff." It seems appropriate. Especially since, as is filtering in through the haze, Jon's never once mentioned the stars even when Stephen and Neil Degrasse Tyson had gone on a totally-not-a-date to that private space exploration expo a year ago.

The wind rattles through them and Jon doesn't seem to notice Stephen shiver. "I took it in college. Mostly to pick up a girl, but I managed to actually retain some knowledge."

"I like the Big Dipper," Stephen says. "I can always find it." He looks up, in case the universe wants to prove him wrong, but the sky is the same as it was when they'd stepped onto this path.

The next time it's Jon's turn to drive, Stephen wants to plug Andy into the laptop and see what he's gathered from this starlit walk. It'll be easy to plug him in, scroll through his sensor logs, ask him what he thought about the experience (Stephen thinks it'll be _[[[acceptable]]]_). Stephen likes easy.

"I would have though you would have picked something obscure. Bootes, or something."

He thinks Jon would protest if Stephen tried to put a USB port in his head, though.

"Nope," Stephen replies. "I like things I can find. That will always be there when I look up."

He settles for watching his lips move while he recites names and stories to himself, to tracking the movement of Jon's feet across the pavement in the glow from Andy's dome.

\---

They go to Stephen's house, because it's the first place they get to anyway and there's a place to park the car. Stephen eases into the driveway and turns the key in the ignition, jostling Jon awake as the engine _tick tick tick_s cool.

"I have a guest bed," Stephen says when Jon flops over in his seat. "It's probably more comfortable than that."

"Mrrgh."

"I'm not driving your sorry ass into New York at this hour. Get out. I've got quilts, too."

"Mrrgh?"

Andy makes nearly the exact same noise when they gather him up. Jon slings bags over his arms and drags them through the door, letting them pile at the bottom of the staircase. Stephen puts their clothes near the couches and keeps Andy tucked close to him. He'll have to close the door of whatever room he puts the robot in, because Andy has the terrifying habit of forgetting what stairs are and speeding over the ledge as fast as he possibly can.

The inside of the house is that strange kind of cool that comes when the heat and air has been turned off for several days. Jon stumbles out of his shoes by the door and slumps up the staircase after Stephen, falling sideways onto the guest bed while Stephen rummages around for extra pillows and the quilt he gives to the best guests.

Andy buzzes around his feet and tries to make a break for the stairs a couple of times. Stephen finally pushes him between the folds of the quilt in his arms while he eases back to the guest room.

The room is at the other end of the hall from the master suite, right next to the staircase. If Stephen gets up before Jon he'll have to remember not to step on the squeaky step. And he'll have to find some soap for Jon to rinse off with. And he might as well wash their rain-and-mud coated clothes together. And by then it'll be lunchtime, and Jon won't want to drive through New York lunchtime traffic, so he'll stay to eat. And by then they might be awake enough to work on some coding for Andy.

He doesn't remember if he has any food in the fridge.

The guest room is empty when Stephen comes back. (Well, not empty. The bed, the night stands, the area rug, the lamps, the alarm clock, and the dressers are all still there. But there is a notable lack of Jon Leibowitz.)

The first thing he does is go to the window, but the yellow Bug is still there. Which may just be because he happens to still have the keys on him. He wanders downstairs to the kitchen and finds it dark -- just like the study and the laundry room. Checking the guest room again, he sits on the bed to confirm that it is, indeed, empty.

"Huh."

He can't hear the shower running, but there's no towels in there anyway, so maybe Jon had clambered into the one in Stephen's bedroom. The light doesn't look like it's on as Stephen eases down the hall, holding one of the extra pillows for a reason he can't recall.

His bed is twice as big as the guest's, and Jon is sprawled in the middle. Stephen throws the pillow on top of him and he rolls over on top of it, mumbling in his sleep. There's nothing stopping Stephen from waking him up and carting him down to the guest room.

What he ends up doing is opening the curtains just enough to see the sky above the trees around his house.

He closes the door to the hallway and puts Andy on the floor, getting undressed while the robot zips around the furniture, cataloguing everything until he's sure the place matches up with @STEPHENCOLBERT's room. Stephen tugs on a clean pair of boxers and watches Andy bolt into the closet, burrowing underneath the pile of sweaters Stephen hadn't bothered to move since he'd figured out that was Andy's favorite place to sleep.

Maybe, in the morning, Jon will have some theories.

Glasses on the nightstand, he eases down on the mattress. Jon immediately throws his arm across the bed and knuckles Stephen in the eye. Even his flailing and kneeing Jon in the leg doesn't wake the man up, which Stephen is going to have to rag him for in the morning.

"It was fun," he murmurs into the edge of his pillow. "The whole fuck-up. Everything."

"Yep."

Stephen sputters a bit and inhales when Jon reaches behind him, hand fumbling along the bare line of Stephen's side. Maybe looking for a shirt to hook onto. Mostly what ends up happening is Jon's fingertips trailing across Stephen's stomach, brushing through the fine hair there.

"Was thinking… that card I gave'ta Anderson."

Stephen swallows.

"S'about time we change the name to Leibowitz-Colbert labs."

He tries to swallow again, but can't. Instead he reaches out to scrape his fingers over Jon's back, trace the lines of his shoulder blades. He doesn't move, and when the thudding in his ears fades Stephen realizes he's started snoring.

Breathing -- if he thinks about anything right now, he probably won't even be able to do that -- Stephen leans forward and kisses the back of Jon's neck.

He goes to sleep with the windows open, mistaking satellites for stars.


End file.
